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PRIZE ADDRESS, 



FOE THE 



NEW-YORK CITY TEMPERANCE SOCIETY, 



ON THE SUBJECT OF 



LICENSES TO RETAIL ARDENT SPIRITS. 



BY ALVAN STEWART, ESQ. 

UTICA, jy. T. 



BALTIMORE: 

RE-PUBLISHED BY ARMSTRONG & PLASKITT, 

FOR C. KEENER, CHAIRMAN OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE- 

MARYLAND STATE TEMPERANCE SOCIETY. 

John W. Woods, printer. 

1835. 



H\l C C ■« ia 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE 



"No human legislator can render that lawful which God hd& forbidden." 
A person cannot be a child of God, and live in the practice of that which 
his reason^ his conscience^ and Scripture disallow: and a man must be in- 
tellectually blind, not to see, that all these faithful monitors absolutely and 
unequivocally condemn Intemperance and the abettors of it. The Ex- 
ecutive Committee, of the Maryland State Temperance Society, view 
the arguments in this address as sharp and piercing as a two-edged sword. 
Therein plain truth makes it appeal to every man's judgment and consci- 
ence in the sight of God; his conscience the meanwhile accusing or else 
excusing him. Reader, if thy heart condemns thee in this matter, if 
thou art directly or indirectly engaged in this unhallowed traffic — God 
is greater than thy heart — He will condemn thee also. 

Christian Keener, 

Ch. E. Committee, M. S, T. S, 



ADDRESS. 



That the drinking of ardent spirits by man is an injury to him, 
is a preposition which will be taken to be indisputable. Need any 
one cite the authority of the medical faculty in this country and Eu- 
rope, the facts presented to the world by more than 2000 Temper- 
ance Societies, or the experience and testimony of every man in the 
world who drinks ardent spirits, and every man in the world who 
does not, each proving with equal force that ardent spirit, used as a 
drink by man, is an injury to him? That the city of New York, 
without descending into detail, is this moment, taken as a whole, suf- 
fering more from the consumption of ardent spirits than from all 
other causes united, can admit of no rational doubt. The remedy 
for an evil which has become inveterate, and has extended itself into 
all the relations of society, ought to be immediately ascertained and 
effectually applied. 

A good system of legislation is one by which the weak and igno- 
rant are protected from the strong, the artful, and vicious. All good 
legislation commands what is right, and forbids what is wrong. Good 
legislation will restrain the baser passions. All legislation tending 
to the encouragement and growth of such passions, is an evil. Le- 
gislation by which one man is authorized to injure another, is un- 
worthy of the name. But what shall be thought of that legislation 
which encourages the worst passions of men, by exciting and tempt- 
ing the avarice of one to speculate on the depravity of another? 

Suppose there was no law in the state or city of New-York au- 
thorizing licenses to be granted to any one to retail ardent spirits, 
to be drunk by the idle and foolish, whose reason had been dethroned 
by the use of the same. Would not an application for a law to li- 
cense retailers to sell ardent spirits to be drunk by their customers, 
be met with an indignant frown of the legislator? Would he not 
say to the applicant for such a law, "Why, you are asking us to 
grant a monopoly to certain persons in our state, by which those 
persons may have a legal right so to use their own property as that 
they may injure their neighbor; and this in defiance of one of the 
first and most christian principles of the common law. The com- 
mon law says, "so use your own, that you do not injure your neigh- 
bor." You ask us to abolish this christian rule, and to build on its 
ruins an odious and demoralizing traffic in ardent spirits, by which 
an alarming blow will be struck at the root of the public morals, 
health, peace, property, character, happiness, and even lives of many 
of our citizens in every city, village and town in the state. 

The legislator, would point the applicant for a licensing law, to 
the law prohibiting horse-racing. Why is there such a law? Be- 
cause, if there were not, men would assemble to race horses, dis- 
pute, ^quarrel, drink ardent spirits to excess, fight, pick pockets, 
«urse, swear, and bet their money on the event of the race, and the 
loser would part with his money without consideration. Therefore 
the legislature has forbidden horse-racing under heavy penalties. 



The legislature has forbidden usury; why? because the necessity 
of those in distress, if there were no limitation to the rate of inte- 
rest, would subject them to an unmerciful exaction by the upconsci- 
entious lender. 

We, says the legislator, forbid gambling, because of the waste 
of time, because men become injured in their morals in keeping un- 
seasonable hours, by hard drinking, by profanity, and because men 
part with their money without a consideration. The common law 
says, that a contract made with a man who is drunk, is void: the le- 
gislator says, we cannot lawfully give you a right to get a man drunk 
according to the statute, and then avoid the contract he makes by the 
common law. 

Shall there be a statute enacted giving several thousand individuals 
a license to make 60,000, or one in forty, of the people drunkards in 
this state, and the right to take from them their property, for that 
which is of no value, for that which makes them and their families 
poor, miserable, and despised; which makes these drunkards idle, 
sick, and profligate; which makes these wretched men profane and 
useless to the public; destroyers of their families; by which they 
and their families sink down a weight upon the public charity, dis- 
turbers of the peace, and become the ranks from whence the peni- 
tentiary, the alms-house, the poor-house, the hospitals, the brothels 
and the gallows recruit their wretched subjects? 

Shall we by law, license grocers to make drunkards, that their es- 
tates and persons may be placed under the custody of the court of 
chancery? Says the legislator, we hold, and so do the laws on the 
pages of our statute-book, that the administering of poison by one 
human being to another is a crime. If one administer poison with 
a bad intent to another, if death does not ensue, the person so doing 
may be punished in the state prison not less than 10 years: or any 
person, who shall mingle poison with food, drink, or medicine, with 
intent to injure any human being, or poison any well, spring, or res- 
ervoir, may be punished for 10 years or less: or if any doctor, when 
intoxicated, shall prescribe poison, or any drug or medicine which 
shall endanger any person's health or life, he shall, on conviction, be 
adjudged guilty of a misdemeanor. And it is further enacted, that 
any apothecary who shall sell any arsenic, corrosive sublimate, prus- 
sic acid, or any substance usually denominated poisonous, without la- 
beling said substances with the word "poison," shall be fined not ex- 
ceeding 8100. 

Now, says the legislator, we consider ardent spirits, as admitted 
and proved by the soundest reasoning which chemical analysis can 
furnish, and by their effects upon individuals who have made a free 
and liberal use of them, to be one of the most dreadful poisons with 
which the world is acquainted; and that there have been more than 
500,000 human beings who have died, from the use of this poison, 
in our own country, since the war of the revolution; a greater num- 
ber of persons than have died in all parts and all ages of the world 
from all other poisons besides. 

Says the legislator, it is our duty to guard and protect the com- 
munity from being deceived, injured or gratified with any thing which, 
from its known qualities and effects, is more likely to be an injury 
than a blessing to the recipient. 



But instead of asking for laws under severe penalties, as we have 
already passed in relation to poison and poisoning, you have the har- 
dihood to ask for a law granting you and other persons, an odious 
privilege, the right of vending this abominable poison. What! You 
ask the legislature for authority to vend ardent spirits, a poison, to 
be drunli by your neighbors and their sons, by which they will lose 
their property, respectability, and reason — all to support and build 
up a few sordid beings like yourself! You ask leave to destroy 10 
men and their families, that yours may exist with prosperity! You 
ask that 10 families may be sent supperless to bed, that yours may 
be fed! You ask that 50 children may go without shoes, that yours 
may be shod! You ask that 50 children may go without education, 
that yours may be taught! You ask that 5 of these 10 drunkards 
may go prematurely to their graves, that you may go maturely to 
yours! You ask the community to maintain 20 of the 50 children 
as paupers, that yours may be pampered in idleness! You ask that 
the daughters of your 10 drunkards may find refuge in a brothel, 
that yours may live in gayety! That their sons may go to the pen- 
itentiary, that yours may roll in their carriages! That their wives 
may die of broken hearts, that yours may live with a merry one! 

But let us look at this subject as it is. The whole system of li- 
censing venders to retail ardent spirits in the state and city of New- 
York (with the late exception of the sale of lottery-tickets, the law 
authorizing which has expired) is an anomaly. Turn over the pages 
of our law, and in no fine, sentence, or section of our system will 
there be found one idea which justifies the principle of licensing the 
sale by retail, of ardent spirits. The spirit and tendency of our 
whole code is at war with the law authorizing persons to retail ar- 
dent spirits. No kindred law yields this ardent spirit law the least 
countenance or respect. 

The grave and stern morality of our code holds, with this exception, 
no parley with vice. She refuses to breathe the air of pollution: she 
levels the artillery of legal vengeance against fraud, deceit, and 
crime. The law summons the v/hole male population to protect the 
life of her humblest citizen, or defend any right he has in property or 
reputation. The law in regard to the system of common schools, looks 
after the morality of the schoolmaster. Every step the law takes in 
administering justice, is with an oath acting on the moral and religi- 
ous hopes founded on an hereafter, the dreadful or glorious future. 
The law is scrupulous in protecting every religious denomination; 
and the law forbids the sale of ardent spirits for the distance of two 
miles from meetings of a certain religious persuasion; it forbids 
the sale of ardent spirits on the Sabbath day to the inhabitants of 
the town where the grocery or inn is situated; it forbids labor and tra- 
vehng on the Sabbath; it forbids the sale of ardent spirits to prisoners; 
it forbids the sale of ardent spirits in court-houses; it forbids the sale 
of the same to apprentices and servants, under certain limitations; it for- 
bids the sale of the same to drunkards who are posted by the overseers 
of the poor, under the penalty of ten dollars. The law is solicitous 
for the health of the citizen: look at the quarantine laws. The law 
is anxious for the purity of food and provisions; behold the laws for 
the inspection and branding of divers commodities. 

Crimes of all grades, from high treason down to the simplest tres- 



6 

pass or invasion of private right, the law forbids and punishes. The 
law has driven duelling, lotteries, and slavery from the state. The 
law has only one dreadful monster left, which she has not felt 
strength sufficient to expel; and therefore she has legislated for its 
existence, instead of its extirpation. The laws point their denun- 
ciations against vice, violence, fraud, crime,' and every other thing 
which may be detrimental to the public or private prosperity, with 
the exception of the ardent spirit trade. The numerous restrictions 
as to persons, places, and times, where, wiien, and to whom ardent 
spirits shall not be sold, are so many implied admissions, by the law 
itself, of the evils of the trade. No other branch of business wears 
such a load of legislative fetters as the ardent spirit trade. Our 
code of laws resembles the beautiful form of a man standing in grave 
majesty, without defect, except on one side of his neck there is a 
large cancer thrusting its fiery roots into the jugular, and drinking 
up the energy and blood, and consuming and wasting the man, who 
is trembling and tottering to his fall. 

Another view of this subject will now be presented. So far as 
the public have been concerned, before the days of the Temperance 
Reformation, the license-money paid by the tavern keeper and gro- 
cer for the right to retail ardent spirits, has been regarded as a source 
of revenue in the hands of the overseers of the poor, for the main- 
tenance of the poor in the several cities and towns in this state. 

The public functionaries who have heretofore granted these li- 
censes, seem to have thought the city or town more interested in in- 
creasing the amount of revenue derivable from this source than in 
diminishing the evil, because this kind of revenue went to support 
the poor; little thinking that this sort of revenue created a necessity 
not only for its own consumption, but frequently from 5 to 20 times 
as much more, to come from some other source. Revenue is generally 
meant to meet some necessaiy public expenditure, not to create it. 

It is meant to feed the starving, and not create famine, for the 
purpose of feeding it; as though we were so happy, prosperous, and 
full-fed, that we had to make laws to create paupers and criminals, for 
the purpose of showing the world how generously we could feed and 
clothe the former, and how easy we could convict and punish the 
latter, when they were prepared by legal necessity for our charity or 
vengeance. 

The idea of subjecting inn-keepers and grocers to a direct tax 
never could have arisen from the fact that the pursuit is more lu- 
crative than any of the ordinary modes of obtaining a livelihood; 
for if this had been so, it would have soon ceased to be, from mere 
competition alone. 

In fact, the common experience of mankind shows that the vast 
majority of tippling-houses are in possession of men neither distin- 
guished for their pecuniary ability or the power of acquisition. Al- 
though the retailer may sell his single glass at 400 or 500 per cent, 
profit, still he has to devote his own time to it; taxes and rent he 
must pay; debts due from the drunkard he must lose. At the next 
door in the city his neighbor is contending with him in the same 
kind of business, and the distress-warrant often dissolves the rela- 
tion between the landlord and his rum-selling tenant. No, the rea- 
son why the license-money is exacted is not the lucrativeness of the 



business; but the true and only reason is the positive injury to the 
public, by creating a monopoly in favor of an individual, by which 
he is authorised according to law to make the poor poorer, the 
wretched more miserable, and then tax the community for their sup- 
port; and all of this for the licensed individual's own peculiar ad- 
vantage. 

The licensing laws endeavor, by a pecuniary consideration, to 
make amends to the community for the injury those licensed indi- 
viduals, for their own benefit, inflict on the suffering public. This 
view of the subject is sustained by the legislation of this state, which 
applies the avails of the license-money for the support of the poor. 
The spirit of our legislation seems very properly and consistently 
to suppose that paupers will be made by the course of this business, 
and therefore the license-money should be applied for their support. 
The theory is this: the grocer who asks for a license will create 
^10 worth of pauperism, therefore that sum must be the price of 
the license. The failure of this theory will appear plain, when it 
is known that the law never had the courage to charge for a license 
one quarter of the expense of the pauperism caused by it. The 
license-money is paid in advance, and thus the grocer makes pau- 
perism, misery, and crime at will; the grocer never gives security 
to make up to the community whatever the pauperism and crime he 
creates exceeds the amount paid for his license. Happy would it be 
for this suffering land, if no grocer could do mischief beyond what 
his license-money would be an atonement for. But the theory of 
making amends by the license-money, is false and delusive. That 
grocer must have done what he would call a miserably poor business, 
who has not caused ten times as much expense to the public as his 
license-money will amount to. It is the business of the keeper of a 
tippling-house to strip men of their property, and their ability to 
acquire more, and then bring them to the door of the public charity, 
and throw them down, saying, "I have rifled them according to law, 
so that they are no longer able to support me, who have deprived 
them of the power of supporting themselves," and then produce to 
the keeper of the public charity his license by virtue of which he 
has done all his mischief. 

Suppose the government agrees with the grocer to board, clothe, 
and pay the physician's bills for all the paupers he creates in his 
grocery, (for the government might as well employ the grocer to 
maintain the paupers he had made, as any other person,) the govern- 
ment saying to the grocer, "You must pay SlO in advance at the 
beginning of the year, and at the end we will pay you." At the 
end of the year the grocer brings in a bill of $100 for supporting 
the paupers he had made, which sum the government pays him; so 
that the government pays $90 more than they received of the 
grocer, or in other words, they pay back to the grocer his $10, and 
900 per cent, interest at the end of the year. Bnt suppose for a 
moment the grocer kept the city or town harmless from expense on 
account of his rum and whiskey paupers, still a good government 
could never justify itself in allowing an individual, with the sanction 
of law, to destroy the health, reputation, and property of its citizens, 
and utterly to blast the hopes of a young family, and scatter misery 
and death in every direction, because the commonwealth was kept 



8 
free of expense. Is the death of a citizen nothing to the communi- 
ty, if the grocer whose whiskey killed him, will be at the expense 
of his funeral? 

Suppose the case, that an individual had a favorite lion and rat- 
tlesnake, and he was anxions that the beast and serpent should, for 
their amusement and exercise, range at large in the city of New- 
York, and the owner should offer the corporation 8100,000 for a h- 
cense for a single day, and no longer. The council of the city of 
New- York would reply to such an application, with honest indigna- 
tion burning on their cheeks, that his one hundred thousand dollars, 
the untold treasures of Peru, and all the jewels which ever spark- 
led in the mines of Golconda, would be no temptation for so outrage- 
ous an act. Why, says the common council, if an individual lost 
his life by our license, all men would say that we had been guilty of 
murder most foul. But, says the owner of the lion and snake, I dis- 
covered by your laws and the practice under them, that for $30,000 
or $40,000, you Ucense 3000 or 4000 men, annually, to poison your 
citizens to death by drinking rum and whiskey, by which from 500 to 
1000 of them die annually. I thought no harm in the offer; as the snake 
would bite and poison not more than one person fatally, before the ser- 
pent would be killed; and the lion would not tear more than one man to 
pieces before he would be shot; and then if the relatives of the deceased 
made complaint to the common council, the common council might 
condole with the bereaved, by assuring them that in granting the li- 
cense they did not intend the death of the deceased, it was merely inci- 
dental, the corporation were only exercising a licensing power the law 
had clothed them with, for the benefit of commerce and the prosperity 
of the city, in replenishing the treasury; and, says the o^vner of the 
lion, I think this reasoning conclusive, especially when it is remem- 
bered that the two persons killed by my lion and snake died with 
their estates and reputation uninjured, and I miderstand that those 
who die of the licensed rum and whiskey poisons, are infamous, and 
paupers; and, as I further supposed that the object of licensing the 
sale of rum-poison was to replenish the coffers of the corporation, 
and that, in the accomplishm.ent of that object, the lives of men 
were to be regarded as a subordinate affair, I can only add my as- 
tonishment at your refusal. 

Public opinion, in different ages of the world, did not bear stronger 
on the evils it redressed, than the temperance reformation does on 
the system of licensing the sale of ardent spirits by retailers: and 
may not this city be encouraged to go forward on the strength of his- 
torical example, in carrying into effect the great doctrines of the 
Temperance Reform, and by a single act prohibit the sale and 
retail of ardent spirits as a diink? If such an act had been in force 
for the two years past, how much would certain forms of death have 
been diminished in the annual bill of mortality for 1833, in the city 
of New- York! Look at it. This bill says, 76 died of intemperance; 
but to this number how many ought to be added of the 30 suicides, 
how many of the himdred dying of apoplexy, how many of the 
69 of casualty, how many of the 1251 of consumption, how many 
of the 510 of convulsions, how many of the 305 of dropsy in the 
head, how many of the 114 drowned, how many of the 249 of per- 
ipneumony might be properly added to the list of intemi:>erate, can 



9 

•oTilv be known at the great day, when all secrets will be revealed. 
It is believed that one-fourth at least of the enumerated lists might be 
charo-ed to intemperance; but suppose but one-sixth of the numbers 
mentioned in the specified lists was added to the 76 returned intem- 
perate, the matter would stand thus: 2828 in the enumerated list, 
one-sixth of which is 471, add the 76, and the number is 547 ex- 
piring of a licensed poison. Awful thought! they are all adults, and 
most of them men, and the heads of families! Look at 500 ship- 
wrecked, no, rum-wrecked, families, the heads of which are dead, 
leaving on an average, a wife and four children, making 2500 surviv- 
ors, heirs of shame and sorrow! 

The number of lives lost, in this single cit)^, by intemperance the 
past year, will exceed the whole number lost on all the waters of the 
nation by steamboat disasters; and yet this is regarded as an evil wor- 
thy of the President's notice and special recommendation, in his an- 
nual message in December, 1833, for the consideration of Congress. 

If the use of ardent spirits, as a drink, should be suppressed in 
the city of New- York in 1834, the city, by that circumstance alone, 
would in 15 years attain to a higher point of greatness in her noble 
career to the high destiny which awaits her, than she would in one 
century, with this rum-cancer on her vitals. 

The barbarous practice of duelling seems to have been almost 
abolished by laws subjecting the second and principal to the same se- 
vere punishment; but not till many ornaments of their country fell 
victims. Our Saxon ancestors sold their children as merchandise; 
no doubt the abolition of the practice met with a vigorous opposition, 
as being an injury to trade and commerce. 

The bloody gladiatorial spectacles of ferocious and imperial Rome, 
the mistress of the world, were abolished by the Emperor Honorius, 
on hearing that Telemachus, a humane traveller from the east, had 
been stoned to death by the infuriated mob, for having two gladiators, 
in the act of nishing upon each other, separated, from motives of 
the most elevated humanity. The ancient nations sacrificed their 
children to Moloch and Mars; but the wicked practice was abolished. 
Witchcraft was raised, by the superstitious stupidity of past ages, 
to the dignity of crime, and a monarch wrote a book to prove it 
such, and the offence was punished with death, before the good sense 
of mankind rose above the folly of the law. The slave trade, after 
having been pursued for two centuries by the maritime nations of 
Europe, without a protest from any body of men, civil or religious, 
and without a parallel in the calendar of crime, has, in the last 
twenty years, been declared piracy by our country and many of the 
nations of Europe. Behold slavery extinguished in our own state 
in 1825. Behold England, at an expense of ninety millions of dol- 
lars, abolishing slavery in the West Indies; by which near a million 
of human beings will, in six years, become free. 

Can the licensing system claim a higher antiquity than slavery, a 
most prominent cause of this evil in its origin? Look at the labor 
of the West Indian slave, the last two centuries, employed in mak- 
ing this poisonous beverage: and if the slave who made the poison is 
to be free, shall we not emancipate the white slave, who has lost his 
property, health, reputation, and liberty in these wretched dens, the 
groceries, the licensed slave-factories of white men? 
2 



10 

There are eight distinguished partners in the rum trade, each part- 
lier faUing back from the first to the second, who leans on the third, 
and so on to the eighth and last partner, all depending on each other 
for existence. The first important partner is the man with dogs and 
guns running down the negro on the banks of the Senegal in Af- 
rica, who has forfeited liberty, life, home and countiy, because his 
skin is not quite so white as the man's who captures him. The first 
partner brings his slave over the ocean, and sells him to the planter 
of the West Indies, the second partner in this firm. The planter 
sells the rum-poison, the produce of the slaves labor, to the import- 
er the third partner of this firm. The fourth partner is the gene- 
ral government, which exacts a duty on the rum imported. The 
fifth partner is the wholesale grocer, the next link in this chain, who 
buys the "fiery distilmxcnt" of the importer. The corporation of 
the city is the sixth partner, and father to the seventh, the retailer — 
the corporation exacting ten dollars of him for his license. The re- 
tailer in his grog-shop is the seventh partner. But the last and most 
important personage in the firm is the grand-child of the corporation, 
the eighth partner, that palsied, trembling, reason-bereft, face-bloat- 
ed, and red-eyed drunkard, the martyr to the business of the great 
Jirm^ the consumer, on whom the whole of the mighty fabric rests, 
embracing two continents, and the islands of the sea, in the disas- 
trous course and sweep of its guilty and death-dealing operations. 
What a stupendous monument of crime! what a fearful combination 
against both races of men, the blacks of one continent and the 
whites of the other; and while the w^orshipers of Plutus stand at 
his altar, the commingled cries of expiring humanity plead for 
judgment and retribution long delayed! 

Look at the destruction of human life by slavery and the slave 
trade; look at the waste of life by white men drinking the rum-poi- 
son made by the slaves. Look at the estates rifled from those dy- 
ing of intemperance, which in the course of commercial circula- 
tion become invested in the business of slavery and the slave trade, 
and produce again the poison to ruin a new generation of drinkers; 
and so it may fairly be said that the rum and slave trades act 
with a reciprocity of injury upon the black and white. 

It may not be improper to draw a picture of the rum-grocer in 
this city, by supposing that the common council had passed a law 
requiring each ardent spirit retailer, at the end of the year's busi- 
ness, on his applying for a new license, to produce a diary for the 
past year, noting in its order, from day to day, every transaction 
in his business, the effect of his rum-poison on his customers, on 
their families, and the public; and that he should make an abstract 
of his diary and swear to it, which should be his amiual return to 
the licensing power; that they might have facts before them by 
which they might judge of the policy of the law and of licensing 
this individual, and the price he should pay for a license the coming 
year, dec. The following may be taken as a specimen of such re- 
turns. 

^^Totke Honorable the Common Council^ 
of the city of New-York. 

"The return of , licensed retailer of ardent spirits. No. 

street, in the city of New-York, of the business trans- 



11 

actions of the said ■- in his grocery, and the effect of the rum- 

poison by him sold to his numerous customers and transient persons^ 
and the effect of the same upon them, their famiUes, the community 
and myseff. 

"I have, during the year past, done rather more than a middhng 
fair business, and have ordered and conducted my grog-shop upon 
the most common and approved principles, honored in the observance 
by the most respectable rum-sellers at retail in this city; but, to be 
more specific, I will state some facts. 

"1st. My shop has been the head-quarters of one mob, who 
were influenced, through my liquor, to do violence to the doors and 
windows of several houses. It was occasioned by the owner of 
a house expressing an opinion that I and my customers were not as 
quiet as he washed on a certain Sabbath evening. During the riot a 
number of the police officers, who wished to interfere and prevent 
mischief, were severely injured. Some of the rioters were much 
bruised, as well as myself, by the boards, &;c. which were torn off 
and broken. Six of my customers, as the ringleaders, were fined 
and imprisoned two months each for the part they took in this af- 
fair, during which time their families were maintained at the public 
expense; three more of my customers absconded, and left their fam- 
ilies to be fed by the hand of charity. I forgot to mention that one 
of my customers, it being dark, fell into the area of one of the de- 
molished houses and broke his neck — he was a single man. 

"2d. I have had 20 scrajyes, or fracases, or sprees, or rows, as 
your honors may see fit to call them, at my grog-shop, knocking 
down and dragging out being the main business; some gouging, 
three eyes were lifted out of their sockets, many shut up in mourn- 
ing, five legs injured, three dislocations, and two fractures. I keep 
a cart to send my customers home in, who are too badly injured to 
go without assistance. 

"3d. I have had 52 men at least, one a week, lie dead drunk for ten 
hours at a time; two of them not coming to so soon as was expected 
on examination,were found to be dead; but a coroner's inquest brought 
in their verdict, 'An accidental death, caused in the course of a law- 
fiil business licensed by a law of this state and of the corporation, 
or 'by the visitation of the corporation through their agent Bacchus 

.' This verdict I understand to mean that they died by the 

permission of the corporation. They were decently interred in Pot- 
tersfield, at the expense of the public, and their wives and 13 chil- 
dren are in the alms-house. 

"4th. I have had 10 husbands, who on leaving my grocery be- 
tween midnight and day, have staggered home and turned their wives 
and children into the street, with an abundance of cursing and swear- 
ing. I have had 15 of my customers picked out of perilous places 
in the streets, where they had fallen down, and sent to the watch- 
house, and sometimes they were trying to get into other, men's hou- 
ses, mistaking them for their own. Three of those customers, on 
waking up in the watch-house in the morning, found themselves rob- 
bed, one of $50, another of his watch, and the third of his hat, 
coat, and boots. 

"5th. 1 have had more than 10,000 oaths taken in my grocery 
the past year. In fact, if you could hear my customers talk, you 



12 

would think tliem under oath all the time, or that they had beets 
brought up in an oath-factory; but in the vast amount of words and 
sentences which I have heard spoken by my customers the past year, 
between the sprightly glibness of the first glass and the fatal paralysis 
of the last, I have not heard a single proposition of a moral charac- 
ter made, by which their happiness Aere or hereafter could be advan^- 
ced. 

"6th. I have lost three of my customers by the deliriumtremens; 
one fell from his horse and burst a blood-vessel, by which he died^ 
after languishing ten days; one being disguised, fell from the dock 
and was drowned. 

"7th. A number of my customers, after going through different 
stages of distress, and suffering, and sickness, produced from the use 
of my liquor, are now taken care of by the public benevolence. 

"I would here remark that I never had a customer who was fre- 
quent at my grog-shop, but, in explaining his private grief, inform- 
ed me, that ever after he became a constant visitor of my shop, his 
wife became peevish and ill-natured, and that it had become his 
painful duty, on reaching his home from my place, at midnight, or 
after, as the head of the family, to call up his wife and children and 
explain to them, in strong and pointed language, the relation of hus- 
band and wife, parent and child, and to enforce the duties of obedience 
and subjection. To explain what he meant, he frequently gave 
them a practical demonstration by a liberal resort to the whip and 
fist, as the great schoolmaster explaining the elementary principles 
of abject submission; or, in other words, that every man should be 
master in his own house. 

"8th. Two of my customers are in the state prison; one for man- 
slaughter. While intoxicated, he killed one of his old neighbors^, 
who had just become an inmate of my house. He little thought, five 
years since, he would now be cutting stone at the penitentiary. He 
was an industrious man, and had $2000 or $3000 worth of property, 
a wife and three children, and was prosperous and happy; but, about 
four years since, he began to visit my house, and then drank moder- 
ately; but it increased upon him, he grew idle, his business forsook 
him; he then complained of the hardness of the times and want of 
employment; he drank to drown trouble, his wife became disheart- 
ened, grew sick, and, under his ill-treatment, died. His estate w^as 
exhausted, and he had pawned on the night of his misfortune, the 
last feathej--bed for his bills; his children have been bound out by the 
public authorities. 

"9th. One of my customers was hung for arson. Another is 
awaiting his trial for cutting his wife's throat while drunk, for not 
getting him a supper when she had no fire to cook it with, nor ma- 
terials to cook. 

"10th. I have followed two of my customers to the grave-yard^ 
who used to complain of a pain in their side; they are said to have 
died of the liver complaint. 

"11th. I supply all of these apparent losses in my customers from 
the ranks of temperate drinkers. I have twenty young men, of fair 
characters, who call only two or three times a week and take a social 
glass, and wonder that men can be so weak that they have to sign the 
temperance pledge; and also wonder why men cannot have prudence 



13 

enough, as they have, to stop drinking when they have got enough; 
this language has been held by all of my customers at the commence- 
ment of their career. 

"12th. I have given away a barrel of New-England rum, the past 
year, in drinking confusion and destruction to all cold water societies, 
as the means of uniting church and state, and destroying all liberty. 

"13th. In making an honest and impartial return, candor compels 
me to say, my eldest son, my bar-tender, 18 years of age has be- 
come a drunkard according to the course of trade, but I have the con- 
solation to think that I have a lawful license from the corporation, 
justilying me in this course, although my son has fallen a victim to 
the law^s of his country. Myself and wife are temperate drinkers. 
All of which is submitted by your worthy and licensed friend and 
supporter of the rights of man, 

" ^ grocer. No. 51. 

"N. B. I forgot to state that I have sold about six hogsheads of 
ardent spirits the past year. The sm.allness of the quantity will suf- 
ficiently account for the meagerness of my report. I ask for a re- 
newal of my license, in the hope of greatly extending my business 
next year, and of making a report which shall better deserve the at- 
tention of your honors. B. D." 

Allow us now seriously to propose a few thoughts concerning a 
remedy of this system. 

The first suggestion, if the license system is to be continued, is, 
that the law should be so altered that a grocer, who obtains a license 
to vend ardent spirits, should not sell, at the place where he retails 
such liquor, any other article or thing. Let the restriction be insert- 
ed in his spirit license; let the retailing of any ardent spirits, as a 
drink, stand alone^ before the community, in all its turpitude, in all 
the baseness of its nature, in all the shamefulness of its deformity, 
as an evil unmixed with good. 

Let the grog-shop be nothing but a grog-shop. Then no person 
who goes to it will have any pretext for so doing, except to obtain 
ardent spirit; his intercourse with such a place will neither be misin- 
terpreted nor misunderstood. The rum-seller will then be obliged to 
follow his business in all the grossness and filthiness of its nature, hav- 
ing nothing on which conscience can lean, to palliate the bitter reflec- 
tion that he is doing wrong. Let it be understood that no one goes to 
this place to buy any other article, such as bread, meat, oysters, cheese, 
confectionary, or fruits, the usual accompaniments of the grocery, 
let it be a distinct and undisguised trade in death. 

This is due to the good character of those who wish to keep a 
quiet and civil grocery, without ardent spirits. Let there be abroad 
line of distinction drawn between the man who sells the means of 
life, and of him who sells the means of death. 

Let the sign of one be life^ health, peace; the ot\\QY,wminds, dis- 
ease, misery, death. 

Then the child, woman or man, housekeeper, or servant, going to 
the grocery to buy necessary articles of subsistence, will not have 
their morals injured or their delicacy offended by the loathsome drunk- 
ard and his profaneness, nor will the very articles they purchase be 
saturated with the drunken effluvia and villanous smells of stomachs 
surfeited past the power of retention. If the evil is to be tolerated, let 



14 

the world behold with a smgle eye the difference between an hon- 
orable and a dishonorable pursuit. Many a man who now asks for 
a license, if this line of separation were drawn, would be restrained 
by his wife or daughters, or some latent principle of decency, from 
following so odious and dangerous a trade as the spirit trade alone^ 
unadorned and unsupported by a single particle of virtue or decorum. 
The consequence of this change would be, to elevate the calling of 
the grocer without ardent spirits, and make it more and more res- 
pectable, while the rum-grocer would become, if not in his own es- 
timation; at least in that of the public, more and more degraded. 
Men of less respectability, and fewer evpn of them, would apply the 
second year for a rum-license, and so it would continue to diminish 
in decency and numbers, and by the third year the business of grog- 
shops and brothels would occupy the same level and hold the same rank. 

In respect to this business, were it to stand alone, public opinion 
would produce its proper effect. It is a business which ought not to 
be connected with any thing else. Let no one imagine that the cor- 
poration has not the power to withdraw this line of division. The 
corporation has entire jurisdiction, and can refuse any man a rum-li- 
cense, who will not take it on the conditions they see fit to impose. Let 
this line be drawn, and no man who wished to preserve his credit as 
a laborer, mechanic, merchant, or professional man, would venture to 
be seen going into one of these grog-shops; to be suspected even, 
would seriously injure his reputation. 

No respectable man would rent a tenement for his residence in the 
vicinity of a grog-shop, where he or his family might be terrified 
with the shrieks, shouts, and midnight orgies of the worshipers of 
rum and whiskey. It would be seen that the grog-shop was a facto- 
ry of criminals and paupers; the first for the vengeance of the law, 
the last for the action of legal charity doled out in the alms-house; and 
the spirit-seller would depreciate the value of real estate around him; 
rent would be reduced, and he would at last become the Bohon Upas 
of his neighborhood. Let this method have its natural effect for two 
or three years, and let the respective wards be authorized, by law, 
to determine by vote, at the annual election, how many persons^ if 
any, shall be licensed, within their bounds, to sell ardent spirits; and 
all those who are temperate, and who value sobriety, decency, mo- 
rality, and piety, the owners of real estate, the grocers who vend no 
spirits, and in a word all good citizens, would vote against licensing 
any person in their ward to retail ardent spirits; and thus the people, 
in the primary assemblies would banish this monster from their wards. 
Thus, without any severe measure, this city would be relieved from 
the incalculable evils which it now suffers. If one w^ard banished the 
monstrous abomination from its bounds, its example would be follow- 
ed by others until the whole city w^as delivered. 

But is it necessary that even so slow a process as this should be 
adopted? Cannot the fountain of these evils be dried up more speed- 
ily? Does not every consideration of public good demand an imme- 
diate remedy? It cannot be denied that the grog-shops are the com- 
mon schools of vice, and, like the gates of hell, they stand open night 
and day. There dishonor, recklessness, profanity, gambling, fight- 
ing and drunkenness are taught as the elements of a ruined man's 
education. Of the population of the United States it has been found, 



15 

on the most careful examination, that one in forty is intemperate, and 
this one in forty is an adult, and generally a man who is the head 
of a family. Supposing the city of New-York to contain 240,000 
souls, and, at the rate of one in forty, there are 6000 intemperate 
persons, and probably 4000 out of these are men, and the heads of 
families, containing a wife and four children on an average, making 
24,000, to which add the 2000 other drunkards, and you have 26,000 
persons, 6000 of whom have ruined themselves, and 4000 of these 
have ruined their wives and children. From this 26,000, the unfail- 
ino- source and nursery of vice and poverty, the poor-house, the alms- 
house, the hospitals receive their recruits; andBlackwell-lsland, the 
jails, the brothels, the state prison and the gallows their victims. Al- 
though the drunkards be but as one to forty of the population, still, 
through the medium of their families, whom they drag down to ruin 
with them, as the sinking man does those whom he grasps in his ex- 
piring struggles, one-ninth of the entire population feel the direct con- 
sequences of drunkenness in all its enormity and the utter ruin of 
their earthly hopes, besides a vast multitude, of whom no census can 
be taken, who, incidentally and collaterally, every day feel the injury; 
to which may be added every one who pays taxes, or has a heart to 
feel for bleeding humanity. 

Let it be observed that 26,000 is nearly equal to the population of 
the capital of this state, and little short of that of the united popula- 
tion of the three cities, of Troy, Utica, and Rochester. 

Amazing and awful consideration, that 26,000 of those around us, to 
whom we sustain various relations, should suffer and perish in this 
manner, and that too in America, the home of the oppressed, the asy- 
lum of the persecuted from every country and clime, the land of 
equal rights and self-government, the land flowing with milk and ho- 
ney, nay, the chief city and metropolis of the American Continent! 
No bloody tyrant has stalked with his armies over the land to pro- 
duce such evils, no dreadful dearth or famine, no overgrown popula- 
tion, by which hunger follows from the excess of numbers, has caus- 
ed the misery. No, labor is abundantly demanded, wages are high, 
every department of honorable exertion is well rewarded, the taxes 
are not one-tenth what the)?^ are in some other countries. The difficul- 
ty is not to be fished out of the mazes of political economy, the cause 
of this misery is not hid in the mysteries and complexities of com- 
merce. No, the cause stands out before us as obvious as the sun at 
noon-day. The drinking of ardent spirits is the beginning and end 
of all this evil. Intemperance begun, carried on, nourished and sup- 
ported in the drunkard's factory, the grog-shop licensed by public 
authority, according to law, is the cause of this evil. The licensed 
spirit sellers, with their licenses from the law in their pockets, stand 
at the door of the furnace of intemperance thrusting in the fuel, ac- 
cording to law, in consequence of which the estates, honor, health, 
and character of multitudes, the mother's hope, the father's pride, the 
expectation of the church, the glory of the bar, the ornament of the 
senate, the dignity of the bench, the infant of a day and the man of 
mature years, all are wasted and destroyed by these pestilent flames, 
which assuredly the corporation of the city might lawfully extinguish 
without delay. 

Some of the criminal courts are in session most of the year, like 



16 

an examining board, inquiring into the proficiency of the different 
scholars who come from these schools of crime, and conferrincr on 
them the various rewards of iniquity, in proportion to tlieir advance- 
ment in the practice of doing evil. Need it be asked from whence 
do mobs, assaults, batteries, riots, manslaughters, and murders pro- 
ceed? Do the rum-sellers deserve the particular compassion of the 
corporation? Have they not done mischief enough? Have not a ma- 
jority of those who have taken licenses in the last 20 years, fallen 
victims to the legitimate consequences of their business? 

Your honorable body lieeds not to be informed of the vast sums 
annually expended to maintain pauperism and prosecute crime, four- 
fifths of which may be properly charged to the licensing of grog- 
shops. This is generally admitted in other parts of the United States, 
and there appears no good reason why the same proportion should 
not hold here. Who can estimate or even imagine the sums expend- 
ed in the grog-shops of this city, and the value of time and the value 
of life wasted, and worse than lost, and all the numberless injuries, 
privations and woes which wait on the system? 

Will not the honorable the common council, the fathers and guar- 
dians of the city, be entreated by their fellow-citizens, by their love 
of country and of man, by the imploring misery of twice 26,000 
hands stretched out to them for pity and relief, to forever close up 
these fountains of death and of hopeless ruin? Will they not be en- 
treated, for the incalculable honor and benefit of this city, and the en- 
couragement and well being of other cities, and as a bright example 
to all the friends of human happiness throughout the world, to abol- 
ish the retailing of ardent spirits, as a drink, within their jurisdiction? 
Do not all the virtuous, the temperate, the wise and philanthropic de- 
sire and call for this great example? Is it not dictated by every con- 
sideration of humanity, of reason, of religion — by the voice of con- 
science, and bj/ all the obligations and the hopes of the present and 
the future life. 

To your honorable body on whom the law has imposed the respon- 
sibilit}', must be referred the primary and momentous question of con- 
tinuing the present system, with its train of evils, by granting licen- 
ses in future; but that the traffic may derive no support from its con- 
nection with useful and commendable objects; that the temptations of 
dram-shops may be presented only to those whose sole purpose it is to 
purchase and drink distilled liquor; that the evils of the system may 
be more distinctly and conspicuously exhibited, and especially its pow- 
erful tendency to seduce and deceive the young, the inexperienced and 
uncorrupt; to deprave, degrade, and destroy its victims, and to cause 
wide-spread misery, poverty, and crime, it is most earnestly and so- 
lemnly desired and hoped that the business of dealing out ardent spir- 
its may be wholly separated from flie grocery and every other trade; 
that your honorable body will require, under a severe penalty, as the 
condition of every license, that no article or commodity whatsoever, 
besides distilled spirits, shall be sold by the person, or on the premi- 
ses licensed, unless public inns and taverns be excepted; and that per- 
sons thus licensed to sell ardent spirits alone, be required to keep over 
the doors of the places they occupy, conspicuous signs, announcingthe 
exclusive object for which they are licensed. 



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